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Sunday, August 30, 2015

"... the right to take videos of police encounters in public is clearly protected by the First Amendment. ... the trend is for police to detain people who are shooting video, and subsequently drop the charges."

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* Conservatives aren't split on this. They support people who uphold the law. Turning away from the incident that needs their attention and interfering with law-abiding citizens who are merely recording public employees in public (who have no expectation of privacy) is breaking the law. Police and public employees who break the law regarding their professional behavior should be fired for cause with loss of benefits. * And/or charged with assault; if the police have no right to interfere with the person filming lawfully, then the actions they take against that person are not legally part of the performance of their duty.* "Doing their job?" Their job is to prevent videography?* ... I shot two photos of a couple Mo highway patrolmen frisking a black driver and then going through his car trunk on the side of an interstate. This was about a week before the Mo attorney general said a study shows blacks are inordinately searched by lawmen. Two hours later they showed up and my house, one said he was gonna 'write a bunch of tickets', but he wrote one...for careless driving, their catchall because i'd stopped on a side road to squeeze off a couple shots. And a seatbelt ticket. One cop was quick to say it wasn't about the camera, but it was the other cop, the backup cop, who had vengeance. Too bad I can't post pix on this site, I'd have uploaded them here to help make them famous. ...* Never met a liberal who was not smart and never met a right wing conservative that was. "I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it. " John Stuart Mill.* Exactly. Presently there is no penalty to the officer for making a bogus arrest for someone recording them. I would suggest taking it a step further. If you make an arrest and charges are dropped, automatic one week suspension without pay. If you delete or attempt to delete a recording, automatic destruction of evidence charges with mandatory maximum sentence. We should be demanding that officers are held to a higher standard!* Unfortunately, many police officers have taken it upon themselves to redefine "interfering". To many it means that if they have to look up and see you then you have interfered in some way whether you actually have or not. "Interfering" has become a catch-all trumped up charge.
...................................................................................................................................................................Citizens Taking Video of Police See Themselves Facing Arrest
By Frank Eltman, August 29, 2015

Thomas Demint's voice is heard only briefly on the eight-minute video he took of police officers arresting two of his friends, and body-slamming their mother. "I'm videotaping this, sir," he tells an officer. "I'm just videotaping this."

What's not seen is what happened just after he stopped recording: Demint says three officers tackled him, took away his smartphone and then tried, unsuccessfully, to erase the video. They then arrested him on charges of obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest.

"I am 100 percent innocent," the 20-year-old Long Island college student told reporters earlier this month. "I didn't do anything wrong. I was just there to videotape."

Civil liberties experts say Demint is part of a growing trend of citizen videographers getting arrested after trying to record police behavior.

It's a backlash that comes as smartphones have made it easier than ever to make such recordings, which have become key evidence in high-profile cases of alleged excessive force, including the shooting of a fleeing suspect by an officer in South Carolina, the dragging of a Baltimore man into a police van, and the chokehold death of a New York City man on a Staten Island sidewalk.

"By all accounts the situation has gotten worse," said Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "People are more inclined to pull out their phones and record, but that is often met with a very bad response from police."

Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association, said he hears of "almost four incidents a week" in which police either harass, interfere or arrest citizens — not journalists — for shooting video. He notes this is occurring at the same time many police departments are deploying body cameras on officers.

"There is no reasonable expectation of privacy on either side," Osterreicher said. "Citizens can record police and police can record citizens when either is out on the street in a public place."

What makes the situation hard to define, civil libertarians say, is that no one is ever arrested on a charge of recording police because that has widely been upheld as protected under the First Amendment. Instead, they are being hauled into court on obstruction, resisting arrest or other charges.

A North Carolina man who says he "kept a safe distance" last spring while recording police taking his friend into custody at a bar was nonetheless booked on resisting and obstructing an arrest, charges that were later dropped.

A month earlier in Missouri, a man claimed he was arrested after recording the police response to a small protest outside the Ferguson Police Department. He says that as soon as he took a step onto a street that was blocked by police, he was booked on a disorderly conduct charge.

In some cases, the arrests are costing taxpayers money.

Earlier this year, the city of Portland, Maine, paid $72,000 to settle a lawsuit by a couple who were arrested after they filmed police questioning a suspected drunk driver.

In New York, a freelance videographer arrested after a Long Island police sergeant ordered him to stop recording the arrest of a suspect settled a federal civil rights lawsuit last year for $200,000.

Demint is also considering a civil case against police, who accused him of being combative and refusing to obey officers' orders to get back when he was arrested last year. His case is still pending.

Chief Kevin Fallon, a Suffolk County police spokesman, declined to comment on Demint's case specifically but said: "Video is certainly here to stay and people have a right to take video. But they don't have a right to interfere."

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said the right to take videos of police encounters in public is clearly protected by the First Amendment. He said the trend is for police to detain people who are shooting video, and subsequently drop the charges.

"Exercising this right has consistently and uniformly been upheld by state and federal courts; they have made it abundantly clear that citizens have right to film police in public," he said. "What is alarming is the degree to which police are ignoring this clear precedent and continue to threaten citizens."

The NYCLU has been fighting back with an app that automatically uploads citizen videos to a central server as soon as a video is recorded, preserving the evidence even if the smartphone is seized.

More than 35,000 New Yorkers have downloaded the app since its launch in 2012, leading to tens of thousands of video submissions. And 17 ACLU affiliates around the country have adapted the app for their communities.

Earlier this month, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed "The Right to Record Act," which declares people may not be prevented from recording the police, provided they do not interfere with the officers performing their duties.

State Sen. Ricardo Lara said the legislation "reinforces our First Amendment right and ensures transparency, accountability and justice for all Californians."

"At a time when cell phone and video footage is helping steer important national civil rights conversations, passage of the Right to Record Act sets an example for the rest of the nation to follow."
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